Harvest of Fear is a quirky, surprisingly enjoyable, plot-driven little slasher film that is not without its charms. On the one hand, you get such moments as the sheriff of this sleepy little town announcing that there is no reason to think the dozen or so local murders of coeds in the past couple of days are related, while on the other hand the film does a nice job of leaving you guessing as to the killer's identity up until the very end.

It's a little hard to judge the film properly without knowing the director's motivations, but it would seem that we are supposed to take the whole thing seriously, which only makes the spots of possible dark comedy all the funnier to me. I mean, how drunk and doped up does a college student have to be to decide to stay on beside Devil's Lake for a few more days of partying when some of their friends have been viciously murdered just a few hundred feet away from the house? That would pretty much take the Festival out of Harvest Festival for yours truly. If I'm going to risk my life by staying, I had better get something better than a drunken costume party out of the deal. It's not like you can't drink and screw in about a billion other towns.

Twenty years ago, we are told, a bunch of college kids got killed at Devil's Lake during Harvest Festival. The cops eventually got their man -- or did they? Plenty of folks think they pinned the rap on a fall guy (who then committed a most convenient suicide before his trial) -- and a new rash of similar murders lends new weight to that way of thinking.

The three-man police force doesn't seem up to the job of finding the murderer or protecting all of the coeds who stupidly choose to keep partying out by the lake for the whole week. Oh, these lawmen are good at cracking jokes over cadavers and fiddling with crime scenes, but that's about it. In fact, one of the deputies is seriously preoccupied with stalking his former girlfriend and threatening the new guy in town who's putting the moves on her. That new guy would be Billy McKinley (Ryan Deal), a young doctor just beginning his internship at the local hospital. It looks like a great job to me because he never has to actually do anything, which leaves him plenty of time to win over the cute office manager (Carrie Finklea). Basically, the only person in town with a decent work ethic is the killer.

Harvest of Fear does suffer from some bad acting (particularly among secondary characters) and spots of pretty weak dialogue -- and cliches abound in the murders (boy and girl sneak off to make out, boy goes back to get something, killer strikes) -- sometimes a topless girl makes a run for it, and that's about the only variety you'll find in play here. The murders are also exceedingly clean -- normally, blood goes everywhere when you slice somebody's neck all the way across (or so I'm told), but not at Devil's Lake. Killing is so much easier when you don't have to worry about getting blood all over you, don't you think?

This film does have one thing that a lot of other low-budget slasher films do not, however, and that is a good plot. Not only is it somewhat difficult for the viewer to identify the killer with absolute certainty along the way, the ending features a plot twist that actually works. All told, I think the plot helps make up for some of the film's various shortcomings.

I know that more than a few horror fans have dissed Harvest of Fear for its lack of originality and comparatively boring murder scenes, but I rather enjoyed the film. It's not the kind of mindless drivel most of us have come to expect from modern slasher films.